The Healthy Tip Corner

Friday, August 24, 2012

Look How We Are Using Symbaloo To Collect and Share Our Favorite Websites and Resources

I have loved Symbaloo since I learned about it a few years ago. It is one of my favorite tools to use. I just love how easy it is to create "webmixes" with all kinds of fun tiles which link to individual websites.

And of course I love how Symbaloo is also a social network....we can share the webmixes with one another and add them to our own account as well.

We have used it at Van Meter in different classes and there have been students that have used it personally, bu this year I wanted to integrate it even more into our school community.

Not only did I share it with our school community in emails, teacher newsletters, the Van Meter Library VOICE and Van Meter Schools Facebook pages, and on the Van Meter Library Google Site, I also set it for the homepage on all of the desktops in the computer lab. It was the perfect place to teach my students about Symbaloo and how it worked.

And they all loved it! The students thought it was fun, easy to use, and had lots of suggestions for new tiles.

The next step....helping the teachers get their classroom computers set up with Symbaloo as their homepage. I have already met with the kindergarten teachers and they have even created their own webmixes that they are adding resources to.

8 comments:

Wow! What a great tool! So many times my students ask me how to get to a particular site or I would overhear a friend telling them the URL. This would definitely save the students time finding sites and give them more time exploring and learning. Thanks for sharing,Jessica

I, too, am a Symbaloo lover. I can't remember what I did before I began using Symbaloo as it saves me countless hours when trying to remember my truly "favorite" websites.

I worked with a high school social studies teacher who had students create individual symbaloo pages for their personal research project. Every source was added to Symbaloo with reorganization required when it came to the final draft. Then the resources that were quoted or paraphrased had to be organized in the first two rows. Students could easily share their thinking on "why" the sources were important enough to be in those rows!